 Rwy'n gweld gwybod hwnnw. Daid yn dweud o ddebyg ac yw'r llif i two. Rwy'n o'n rhoi gyd o'r cyffredinol fydd. Rydw i'n hwn i'r ffordd fydd i'r cyffredinol. Rhyw gyd o ffyniadau chi yn fy mhob? Rwy'n o'n rhoi gyd o ffyniadau chi'n fydwch chi'n ffordd fyddion. Rydyn ni'n defnyddio ylad amddangos ni'n heddiw i sioedd o'r unigwyddiadau a'r unigwyddiadau o'r unigwyddiadau. Rydyn ni iddyn nhw'n sioedd enniadau o'r unigwyddiadau, yn gellibl mae marwamen nhw'n rhwng sydd yn gallu'r hyn wych yn gaeladau. yn y Gweithnod Yng ng delleil a chynnwys yn gweld fod yn dweud i'w gwnaed rhan i gweithredu Gymru, felly, oherwydd, yw fy gwybod, oherwydd mae'r Gweithredu'n cymdeithas oherwydd, mae G-Di recreationol mewn cyllangoddau ar unrhyw yng Ngheilwyr. Yna bod yn digwydd oherwydd yn 50,000 yng nghymru a'r Gwyddon Gweithredu Acharyllach, Well, I have just called her to show us into humanity and the social sciences, which gives us the opportunity to now think about that and see what that means to come from that background, and I'm sure you will notice that in the talk as well. She's a professor of water governance at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in water empowerment with a specific emphasis on gender relations. She's one of the very few people who has worked on masculinity in the water sector. While we often, in development studies, think about gender, we may be politically correct and say it's not only about women, but we often work about disputing them and anticipating justice for women. In the water sector, dominated by men, masculine in culture, one of the big gender topics is masculinity. I don't know how much of that will be visible in the talk, but if you have interest in that, I'm sure that you will also be interested to talk about that. She works in several projects, which are just a hint at one, I think it's closed under drip irrigation work, and presently they're probably from Deltas, and all of that work is about the narratives, the knowledge about that topic and how the natural and the social science links to each other. I'm talking very close to my heart. She is presently involved in two international training networks, funded by the EU, very prestigious projects, though that is not necessarily something that so much is aware of, I can tell you. 50 PhDs together in a training network, one of them is on local development and activist, road of activist scholars, a kind of a political ecology project, and the other is just starting, so it is part of that also on water governance, the next water government. So we are presently recruiting advertisements. Please look at the website New Wave, not the music from the 1980s, but the name of this project, next water governance, 15 PhD positions, the best funded PhDs in Europe, so if that is in the centre for you, you can also look at that. One of them is at Samas, and the other 14 are in all kinds of other institutes in Europe. That's, I think, an advertisement. You can see a very broad interest in the water fields, so I'm not sure if I'll do my best. Thank you. The floor is yours. This format is very simple. It's about 40, 45 minutes talk. I did time to already say that, so I may take more than 45 minutes, but I'll try to keep time. So thank you, Philip, for inviting me, and thank you Peter for the nice introduction. Nice to see you all here. I was actually very good of you, Philip, to invite me because I really needed to spend some time on this groundwater project, so this forced me to get the work started. So what I will do today, I will talk about a groundwater project that I'm part of, and before I say something more about the project, perhaps it's good to say that groundwater is a very important source of water, and it has become increasingly so because of ever cheaper drilling and pumping technologies. There is a lot to do about groundwater. Just yesterday there was an announcement of a groundwater policy initiative. These are bound. There are so many groundwater policy initiatives, and there is something interesting about the policy statements on groundwater, I find, because on the one hand they all proclaim the beauty of groundwater, as it were, groundwater as a source of food, as a climate buffer, as also as a fountain of development almost, so it's almost a call for tapping into the yet untapped groundwater resources, so that's one call of the policy statements. Also this one, but on the other hand there is a lot of pessimism and alarmism about aquifers that are depleting and that are being polluted. I find the two next to each other a bit contradictory, and it becomes even more contradictory in a way if you start reading the groundwater management and governance literature. Because if you start reading that literature it becomes very clear that the governance of groundwater, nobody knows really how to do it. There's no clear guidelines or rules or regulations or ideas about how to regulate, how to manage, how to govern this resource which is invisible. It's very difficult to know quantities of groundwater. Hydrogeology is a very difficult topic in the project. We work with hydrogeologists and it's mind-blowingly difficult, which also means that it's a resource that often people don't know how much of it there is, and so if you don't know how much of it there is then it becomes very difficult to manage it and to share it etc. On top of that of course the groundwater accessing it happens through tube wells or wells and pumps and these are often individually owned. They're easy to hide in some of the places I've been in Peru, the agro-export companies that have their big tube wells and they don't even allow people from the government to come in and to check the tube wells. So that's one scenario but it's almost impossible for any government agency to keep track of all the wells and to keep track of how much water is being extracted or being used. So it's truly difficult to govern and that puzzle is a recognised puzzle. So in groundwater, and I think as it's shown in this paradoxical on the one hand saying hey we have this resource, let's use it because it can be a fountain of incomes, profits, climate buffer, whatever. And on the other hand hey aquifers are depleting help, these two. Of course something that is interesting about groundwater is that you can use it now but indeed it's not clear for how long you will be able to use it. So there's a tension between the direct benefits that it generates and the longer term benefits but there is also a tension between if I use groundwater and you're my neighbour then I might suck your wells dry or I might also use yours. So there's also a tension between individuals and how this resource is shared and these two tensions are at the heart I think of the groundwater governance challenge. Now a little bit about the project. Most of the project number this was last year when we had our kickoff workshop in Pwlen in Maharsha. I think perhaps Ayatrion and I forgot your name you will recognise some of them. The idea of the project is it comes partly out of the drip project that Peter mentioned. While we were working on the drip project we realised that in several places that we had been working there are very interesting initiatives of communities or people or groups of women or NGOs who organise around groundwater either to protect the resource or to share it better or they organise to protest against extreme forms of extraction for instance in Chile by lithium mines and we thought our hypothesis was perhaps these initiatives are interesting to study because perhaps they contain insights into how groundwater governance can be done. So this is basically the idea of the project as we have identified the number of those initiatives in the oasis of Algeria and Morocco in several places in Maharashtra, in Peru, in California, in Tanzania. Tanzania is a slightly different case. So today I will be mostly speaking about Peru a little bit about Morocco. So decolonisation I must admit I like the term it sounds appealing. I must admit I have not spent a lot of time reading on decolonisation. So whatever I say about decolonisation and if you know more about it then feel free to interrupt me or to question me or challenge me. So what I am doing now is what I wanted to do in the presentation is really thinking through is what we do in the groundwater project. Could we consider this as a form of decolonisation and if so how? So this is what on the slide this is what I thought a decolonisation of groundwater governance would consist of. It's basically three things first, identifying how current approaches to doing and knowing groundwater are colonial. Are they colonial? So how are they colonial? By revealing or exposing these approaches as colonial I thought perhaps then you create space for recognising that these are not universal or the only possible ways of governing. Creating space for also recognising others, alternatives or the ways of knowing, doing groundwater. And then the last point then perhaps an interesting conversation can start. A new conversation about what is good groundwater governance and how to do it. So that's basically how I envisage decolonisation and I don't know whether that is the same as others would do it. Before I start I have two other reflections. One comes from Amid Acharya whom we invited last year at IEP to give a lecture in what we call week one. Week one is the first week when all the students come to the institute. Some 250 students they come from all over the world but mostly from the so-called global south. They come to Delft to the Netherlands in the hope of acquiring water wisdom. And of course the common to Delft is somehow associated with implicitly or explicitly with an idea that the best wet water wisdom or very good water wisdom is to be found in the Netherlands because of all kinds of associations of the Netherlands with water expertise. What we wanted to do in this week one and the reason to invite Amid was we wanted to use this week to question some of these assumptions about the superiority of Dutch water expertise. Also to question a little bit what is good water expertise and where does good expertise come from. Are there other sources or ways of knowing water? That was a little bit the idea. So it's always very energising and inspiring to do this and to have these conversations with students. Amid he gave a wonderful lecture and that was also many students also really inspired by that. But this is one of the questions that Amid asked and he said Are we supposed to decolonise Anglo-European knowledge hegemony in academia if most of such efforts are headed by Anglo-European scholars in universities in the West? Scholars in the majority world need to really think through this. And I thought it was an interesting question and it also made me think. And I think yes in a way that it is a bit awkward. It is a bit awkward that these students who come to Delft full of hope and full of aspirations to gain better knowledge on the first week we tell them how we shatter them hope a little bit and we question their hope. So that's a bit awkward. It's also a bit awkward that I as an old white female professor tell them hey the knowledge that you come to get here in the Netherlands is not that good after all or something like that. So that's also a bit awkward. So yes in there I agree with Amid's question but while thinking it through I thought yeah the question on the other hand also suggests that it is possible to have a pure or innocent position in the debate about decolonisation and that it's possible to somehow head that if you come from the majority world as Amid calls it that then automatically what you have to say or your knowledge will be more decolonial and I think that will also be naive. So but I think the awkwardness of the question and the awkwardness that the question causes is important and I think we have to at least think staying with this awkwardness and making it explicit and using it as a source of reflection about positionalities in knowledge is very important. So rather than making it quickly go away because it's awkward because it gives a feeling of unsettleness I think it's good to continuously remind I at least want to remind myself about this awkwardness and where it comes from. So that was my first reflection and the second reflection has to do with this article decolonisation is not a metaphor and what can I say about this it's interesting just when I was preparing for this seminar I was asked to review a thesis done by an Australian scholar who was studying groundwater in north-western Australia and the topic of the thesis really was hey how does how do Australian water policies acknowledge or not indigenous waters and indigenous knowledges that was the topic of the thesis. The thesis was used quite strong language but by reading the thesis what I realised is that hey indeed decolonisation is not a metaphor because the thesis very clearly traced the Australian water history through to settler colonialism and to a particular way of appropriating land and water that have occurred in Australia and the thesis said well the current water policies and laws and institutions are still a legacy or still bear the legacy of this settler colonialism of the past. So this was one that and I thought oh yeah it's not just about decolonising education or not just about thinking through how knowledge systems are still colonial or epistemologically western or something it's also about continued forms of land and water appropriation that in a way still bear the legacy or have the legacy of these older forms of settler colonialism and interestingly when I was thinking about this I was corresponding with because some of the one site in our round water project is California so I was emailing with one of our Californian partners and I was asking her in what direction is your work going and she was actually the one who sent me these articles and she said well what I want to do I want to trace the history of California's dealings with groundwater also to this settler colonialism and she wants to engage with an emerging movement of indigenous scholars who are doing this again also saying hey it's still ongoing it's not a metaphor so for me that was important I thought okay yeah it's important in two ways it's also important to realise words matter words and concepts and theories are also world making so it's not just about education it's also about what happens to lands and waters these just as two first reflections I always like this picture Carolina Dominguez and Guzmán took them in Peru there are billboards on the side of the roads and they need billboards actually to promote the arrival of agro-export, agro-industrial companies and so what they say is well this one says algo bueno está pasando so something good is happening I think it's interesting that you need billboards to tell this but it's also interesting to show that hey there's active efforts needed to promote this kind of plantation agro-export agriculture and I'll say more about it later and to convince people that this is the good this is what we want so also to say yes it's more than a metaphor this is also actually happening so what I will do now I will first try and say something about this more than a metaphor and I will try and what I've tried to do is to look at how is it possible to look at groundwater governance or is it useful to call it colonial and I've chosen perhaps the easiest example this is an example from the Icarra in Peru it's a view from the sky it's literally conquering the desert by tapping into the aquifer so it's an aquifer so it's an interesting so by digging ever deeper it becomes possible to cultivate ever more land so in that sense indeed groundwater can be considered a new of another or a new agricultural frontier in that sense it resembles forms of settler colonialism so when adopting a very broad definition of colonialism groundwater governance can indeed be said to be colonial in two main ways I think at least the first one is in how it goes accompanied with replacement the replacement is a quite neutral term but you could also say erosion transformation and sometimes destruction of existing forms of living and using lands and water by new ones this often but not always happens because these lands and waters are appropriated by new commons or outsiders in colonial terms these people are called settlers from elsewhere and that this happens in many countries I think of Mexico I think also of India of Morocco of Chile what happens here is very actively promoting this type of agriculture how it is through privatisation of land and water land and water tightening programme that was explicitly aimed at making it possible for different waters to be compared and therefore exchanged and is exchanged in the context of market capitalism means appropriated by those who can pay the most but that was the intention also free trade agreements in Peru with the United States a very generous and welcoming investment climate subsidies all kinds of subsidies so everything in Peru was Peru had its arms wide open to welcome investors from outside our export companies and these fields are asparagus so what has grown here is asparagus and of course the billboards that I just showed this kind of intensification of agriculture intensification of agriculture goes accompanied with a lot of talk, discourses but also a lot of science to say that this is good and this is development, this is modernisation this is what should happen and a lot of groundwater science is also and I'll come back to that later is mobilised to support this so just a few slides to say a bit more to show a bit more about what happens in Peru so it's very clear what happens you can see the slide here it shows the area cultivated with asparagus and it links that to how much water this growing of asparagus is using a slide about how and this is 2008 the interesting thing is or one of the interesting thing is here I mean we are now in 2020 and in 2008 and I remember it well when I was in Peru people said well we only have five more years to go but the aquifer is still not empty or it's still not fully depleted asparagus are still being grown which itself I think is telling because this aquifer and the behaviour of the aquifer and how much water there is is so difficult to know so what happens is here are other slides what happens this is asparagus and what happens is that this here in the Ica valley what has happened is these agro export companies come in they buy land and a lot of this land originally it was very cheap because it was desert land they needed also water what they would do is they would start buying the wells of existing farmers and it's a complicated history and if you're interested I can say more of it because there were and there still are many small older farmers also and some of them also went into asparagus farming but many of them also saw themselves more or less or it was very attractive for them to sell their wells to these agro export companies because they would offer very high prices so what you see is a total reconfiguration of land, water, labour because the labour needed for these asparagus farms often was where the indigenous people would come from the high mountains so not the people from the area itself because that labour was cheap and in that time indeed water was very cheap so attractive for agro export companies but also they wouldn't have done it if labour had been more expensive so it's labour and water together so what is also happening is these outsiders of course they clearly they come because they are interested in profits and so that is a sort of you could say a sort of colonial move because they don't have any attachment to the lands or the water they don't have any interest to invest in caring for this land or water because if there is no more water they will simply go and move elsewhere now I can say more about this and I will say more about this later but this is a little bit how many people present this story and you can tell very similar stories about Mexico or about Chile about Morocco very similar to although there many of the investors don't come from outside but are from Morocco itself and what you can see is in all these countries there is an active promotion by the government of an intensification of agriculture in Morocco this was Le Plas Marocwe I think India is very active in wanting a second green revolution which is also premised on making more use of groundwater so it's actively promoted and sponsored through subsidies drip irrigation that's an ironic one because drip irrigation is often subsidised because it is thought that if you use drip irrigation you will use water efficiently or wisely but of course in these cases drip irrigation is mainly used to conquer the desert and not to so yes perhaps the per crop the crop per drop increases but the overall amount of water used crop per drop also increases so there are several ways of looking at this and I don't know whether the frame of whether colonial is the most helpful one there are also other theories there are also theories of accumulation by dispossession or theories of water grabbing that you can also mobilize to explain this now I had put some slide here about asparagus because asparagus is also so weird it's so weird because in Peru and Peru is a country especially Lima is a country that is known for its chefs so you have very good restaurants and you have very good cuisine in Lima but nobody in Peru eats asparagus it's not a crop that is known so and the asparagus grown in Peru are the biggest importer of those asparagus is the UK actually so so there have been actions also in the UK against the import of of Peruvian asparagus which is a little bit patriotic so how many slogans the home grown ones taste better of course and stuff like that and not in all those actions water figured very prominently but of course water is also figured so with all this oh yeah this is just a slide to show how ground water can be seen as an agreement from here in the left slide you see asparagus on the left hand then you see it closed and then you see what used to be there before the asparagus came and this is a slide in Morocco on the left hand side you see in Morocco the land used to be a lot of land was in cooperatives at some point the government decided that the land used by farmers in cooperatives was used unproductively or inefficiently so it was a waste of land and also of water they privatized it and attracted new investors all the new invested land the new private land that was bought by this looks like this with the same kinds of fences and the first thing they do is higher drillers I don't know for some reason in Morocco they all come from Syria they drill and if there's water it's grapes or it's an orchard so it's all the same just to see yes it's also an agreement all this to say yes it's possible it's possible and plausible to characterize ongoing processes of agricultural processes of agricultural intensification that are based on pushing the aquifer frontier it's possible to characterize them as contemporary processes of colonialism and doing this in a way it helps see that the resulting over abstraction and depletion of aquifers is not just collateral damage but is intrinsic to the specific historical forms of capital farming that are just promoted so these do indeed resemble or the more traditional forms of colonialism in how they render existing forms of living and farming or using lands and waters obsolete both by depicting them as backward and inefficient and by different forms of dispossession of both water and land and the clear parallel with colonialism is this is that tapping into deep aquifers is a form of expanding the agricultural frontier allowing the conversion of existing habitats to agriculture conquering the deserts so that is in that sense calling this colonialism or a form of colonialism is perhaps useful I think it's also useful because by doing this it also becomes clear that problems of depletion and over abstraction cannot just be are not just problems of the greed of individual farmers that they are not so it's not just the individual farmers or entrepreneurs or they are also not just a problem of lack of compliance or of a generic governance gap a lack of political will corruption or the difficulty to enforce regulations because that is if you read the ground water governance literature those are the causes of the problems that are often given but indeed what is happening in terms of depletion and pollution and over abstraction is the intrinsic feature of a form of intensive agriculture that can only make profits by systematically undervaluing water as well as labour so I think that's important and that's useful tracing this connection between the particular form of development and agricultural intensification and aquifer depletion and I think in another way what is useful about this is to show that a lot or to show that what happens to water very little in terms of what happens to water is steered or guided by formal water policies or laws so most of it is guided by entirely different processes the ability to to drill well or by desire for agricultural intensification or markets and I think that's also important because also when you read the ground water governance literature a lot of it remains very firmly in a formal water and policy law domain as if suggesting that indeed it's possible to regulate control water through permits or pricing or whatever means are proposed so this is the more than metaphor part of the of the how groundwater is colonial and oh yeah this is just to repeat it's actively state promoted it's not something it's not individual entrepreneurs who are who happen to be greedy it's actively state promoted it's policy almost everywhere now the second part is what I want to say about the colonialism of groundwater is I was trying to think is groundwater science or is groundwater governance is it possible to see a colonial legacy in how policy science and literature talks about groundwater governance now I did, I read a lot and I didn't do yesterday if Peter and myself were in the room people kept repeating the phrase a systematic literature review I don't think I did a systematic literature review I did a very dirty and quick one but this is what what struck me when I in my quick and dirty literature review is and I don't know you can also answer the question perhaps I don't know whether you can say that with these characteristics groundwater or the policy science literature in groundwater is colonial but what struck me is it's clearly resource oriented in the sense that it talks about groundwater as if it is possible to isolate groundwater both from other waters and from land any wider context and the main concern of all this groundwater governance literature is how to counter or avoid depletion and pollution while increasing crop per drop that is really the main concern most of the groundwater governance literature is intervention oriented and most of it assumes or continues to assume that there is an important role for the state in governing groundwater so the means of the things that are proposed licensing, sanctioning often in combination with markets and private property right all point to the state and identify also with the state what should the state do two different list here so I should read this one what I find interesting is that there is a tendency increasing tendency in the literature to posit water as a global problem and to say hey we have I think perhaps on the waves of climate change and the anthropocene kind of thinking groundwater problems is a global problem and by suggesting that it's a global problem also the need is suggested for one coherent global view and that is one the global groundwater the state of groundwater in the world or something is only scientists can only express and articulate that and I always a bit I have a bit of discomfort with that also because it feeds into an imagination of the global as the bigger whole to which then the local needs to of which the local is a kind of subsystem and then global mess then also comes to signify one overarching order or something the one that scientists first need to unravel before policymakers can intervene in it and this global order also then feeds into a suggestion that there is one correct way of knowing and doing things in the universe the universe that scientists can concern how to avoid waste increase crop per drop and of course the increase crop per drop efficiency and Peter also knows this is what we have grown up with this is the concern of the irrigation engineer so it's old and you could say perhaps it's colonial I don't know but it has not changed of course the ground water governance literature is also displaced a very strong belief in modernization and it has a very strong technological optimism also technological optimism in the sense that many of the global groundwater initiatives have made big promises about ever more advanced tools models satellites et cetera that can mobilize to know groundwater and of course the suggestion often is that knowing is the necessary first step for governing, for managing so this is my quick and dirty review of the groundwater governance literature is this colonial in a certain sense yes the concern remain the same as they have always been in water so perhaps that's colonial I'm not sure how useful it is to call them like that and perhaps another way in which groundwater governance is colonial maybe a stronger way in which it is colonial is that when I looked at try to see who are the people producing this knowledge and if you look at that it's clear that groundwater governance brings together old epistemic friends who share a long history of developing and actively promoting and circulating water knowledge a particular body of water knowledge and it's a body of knowledge that is very closely linked to water projects and policy reform initiatives funded by Development Corporation so it's there's a very strong link there so much of this knowledge is also the knowledge generation itself is also funded by Development Corporation money so I think in that sense there is a colonialism there perhaps so you can say yes the groundwater governance knowledge it belongs to a particular epistemic tradition a particular successor project in agriculture or water science one that is directly aimed at efforts to improve the effectiveness of water projects and water policy reforms funded and supported by Development Corporation money and loans Does this matter? Let me give an example of how it perhaps matters and the example is a bit unfortunate because this is Arun Hoogstra and Arun Hoogstra not very long ago he suddenly died so say hello to Arun wherever he is and what Arun did Arun studied in Delft and then he moved to Twente and he was very concerned about the state of water in the world and what he did he came up with this idea of the water footprint in analogy with the ecological footprint it's a wonderful idea I think it's the 22nd of March that will water day 22nd of March in the Netherlands there is something about water in the newspapers and mostly it often it's something like oh you need to have these water savings shower heads or stuff like that or you need to shut up your tap when you're brushing your teeth stuff like that every year Arun would send a letter to the newspaper saying it's not about the savings shower heads it's your meat consumption in that sense the water footprint is a very powerful tool to create awareness of how much water goes into the production of whatever whatever to make consumers aware about hey you're consuming water for almost everything that you use and buy so that's the water footprint the interesting thing is the water footprint travels to Peru it travels to Peru when the Autoridad Nacional de Agua in Peru the Peruvian Water Authority invited Professor Ayun Bukstra to come to Peru to help solve its water problems because Peru of course the government knew that hey our policy of agricultural intensification it's draining our aquifers it's sucking our aquifers dry so we need to do something now the Swiss and the World Wildlife Fund were happy to contribute to this effort and they funded Ayun Bukstra's visit to Peru and what happened after Ayun had done his visit and made recommendations the national water authority came up with this and what they said is it's certificate of azul it's the blue certificate and it's a certificate that farmers can obtain when they promise to use water wisely in their farms and so if they use water wisely they get the certificate of azul and then and then the certificate of azul then also makes them eligible for subsidies and they have it so it's like you get a stamp on your forehead you're a good farmer that was the answer you're in 40 minutes okay which farmer do you think gets the certificate of azul this is the these are mangoes by the way we have moved from asparagus to mangoes but it's also grown in the same desert coast which one do you think gets the certificate of azul yes the top one what do you think exactly like every industrial process it looks like a plantation it looks like a plantation you're right so the thing is and I won't get into all the details here but actually it's very difficult it's very difficult to establish who is using water wisely and the only way to establish this is indeed in farms like that in the plantation kind of farms because you have only one crop and it grows and the other thing is these trees are irrigated with drip irrigation system so at some point you can measure the amount of water because it goes through tubes you can measure how much you use so that also and this one they use a system called posas it's interesting if I show this these slides to irrigation engineers they are shocked waste of water you cannot see this the water like this in the field it's immediately all the alarm bells start ringing and this is a brother and sister the interesting thing is they also produce mangoes for the market so the mango that you buy in your supermarket might either come from this farm or from this farm you wouldn't see the difference of course because they have all been made sure that they are good enough to be in the supermarket but they might be produced in very different ways which one is the more efficient that's the point of the story in terms of water is not so easy to establish why? because this water system yes they have mangoes but they also produce all kinds of other stuff with the same water the posas system that they use they have done they have farmed in this desert area of Peru for generations they know that they need to deal with water wisely so they have developed this posas system this is also a rainwater harvesting system it's an aquifering system so it's all different things if you talk to them it's interesting there's many interesting things about this but it's also interesting that they they do not want to have these smaller trees and need rows they talk about the mango trees as almost as living bees they like the trees to be tall but the interesting thing of course about tall trees and about trees that you don't irrigate all that much they also develop much bigger roots if you have developed bigger roots you can grab more nutrients from the soil so you need to add less artificial nutrients etc so there's a whole stories to be told about this about this comparison and why I'm telling this is hey if if this water footprint travels to Peru if this becomes the norm for using water wisely and automatically these two people they will be seen and they become backward inefficient the one who are not deserving of support and the one who needs wants to disappear whereas of course it could well be I don't know but it could well be that there is wisdom in how they use water as well and interestingly this research is done by Karolina Karolina in two minutes was one interestingly we are now doing some further research interestingly it seems that now the government of Peru has discovered this POSA as a possible technology for saving water so we are also tracing that so interesting things are happening what I want to say so yes there is colonialism here as well in a way a colonial knowledge that may work not just to to expropriate lands and water but also to make very interesting and potentially good water wisdom disappear the pity also is that there is never a conversation between these two logics because engineers and agronomists when they see this they are appalled it sparks that curiosity so there I think is an interesting idea for decolonisation is finding ways of having this conversation and so to end my talk oh yeah this is just a little bit more about my talk and I had I think three three proposals for how to do decolonisation and I think the first one was is just to redefine what is groundwater governance I was a bit shocked to see how ideas about groundwater governance although many definitions of governance say hey governance is governance beyond the state if you look at groundwater literature it's very much still the state it's very much focusing as if it's possible to isolate and separate water from land and from labour and sex work so I would say hey a different definition of governance is needed a contrast and compare I think is interesting there's interesting work happening especially in Australia I'm discovering and this comes from a small little article of someone who compared the OECD principles of water governance with the logic of a particular group of of an Aboriginal an Aboriginal community and so I'm just copying here the logic of dealing with the water of this community and she in the article she compares the two and I think doing this is very interesting it's interesting because it brings into really the logic of both and then you can have then you can start a conversation there's also a danger with this contrast and compare especially perhaps if you frame it in a colonial decolonial is that instead of a conversation between the two what happens is that the indigenous knowledge suddenly becomes the ideal or the the coin is simply flipped instead of having the conversation and if I go back to the this one here I would very much like to invite an irrigation engineer or and to do a good water efficiency analysis of this one and to have the conversation rather than not just saying this is a good one or this is a bad one let's study it and let's use this to have some symmetry in the conversation um the pluralize is a third form of decolonization and here I'm guided by three thoughts basically is that processes of colonization are never complete and I'm saying this also because yes it's very easy for me to show these for me are these shocking pictures of the desert of Berlin as paradise and to blame big bad iron export companies the evil is easy to identify in Morocco this already becomes much more difficult because Moroccan investors are from Morocco themselves some of them are hobby farmers and and what you also see is that some of the younger farmers in Morocco they themselves want to engage in these new forms of farming so then the boundaries start blurring it's not so clear anymore what is the good and what is the bad and I think a lot of this is true in many places it's also that colonization is never complete realities it's also that realities always exceed abstractions so what if you call it whatever you call it whatever to you use the realities always more and ground water exchange so I think it's always interesting to find places, initiatives things that escape frames of your theories because if you start those are interesting to think with because they can plurify they can provide new inspirations for new imaginations so learn from monsters queering so this is basically my presentation and my conclusion is yes it's interesting to decolonize ground water governance I'm not always sure whether a decolonial lens is the most useful one for understanding what is happening I'm also a bit scared when I read some of the decolonizing literature that what I already said that it looks for a purity in indigenous people a purity or innocence or a goodness and I agree that that might be interesting things there but it's never innocent and it's never pure I would say so I think that a third step is the engagement with real initiatives to do water differently to document, compare and discuss these and Thank you for the excellent and wide-breaking talk where I'm sure many many things to respond to it speaks to saw us in different ways the thematic of decolonization obviously and we have a task force for that at saw us and one of the elements is the competence there decolonizing knowledge and our teaching and our research so that maybe there's reflection on that and then there is the subject matter itself of groundwater and agriculture and production and the thinking around that the implicit interdisciplinarity that you're strongly advocating with that menacing today which social scientists go measure of water of water efficiency not too many so there's an interesting point there and then the framing of governance the conceptualization of governance Philippine IT so of course on water governance we should take this too hard as well I guess and how are we thinking concealing of governance is it state the status argument was very interesting but I'm sure there are many other dimensions also that I are closer to your interest so I simply open the drawer for questions let's begin with sounding out a number of the issues and collect a number of questions from you or remarks or comments or puzzles and then we'll give my head just to see what the interesting of my ways have a question and please introduce just say your name introduce yourself a little bit so that we know okay I don't study it so my name is Tara I do international development and humanitarian work mostly in wash so not specifically the government but I've been involved in projects I'm more based in London now I used to be a lot more involved in a number of things thank you very much it was really interesting but the idea that major development axes that are engaging in aid like FAO and UNDP for example like there's lots of them I found when I've had grants from agencies like that that they do fully acknowledge stuff to do with depletion I don't think that the way that they acknowledge it is adequate in a select list but I don't think that there's like a deny the fact that there's environmental depletion or ground word depletion from some of the activities that take place it's the problem is that the implementing partners and I've been one of those it's just the tick box exercise that you have to go through to demonstrate whether or not you're considering some of these aspects and much like your blue stamp it's very similar basically and it's bullshit to be honest but I don't know it's very difficult to know exactly how to tackle that because to my mind a lot of the results that they want to see they want to see them achieved at their absolute maximum within a presidential period or whatever because that's where the money is coming from USA or something so like if you're talking about five years and they've got to get those mango trees going you can't do the bottom picture of the mangoes that's the problem is that I think that the time scale needs to be more like geological and less presidential and that's a really simplistic way of looking at it but like if you actually really want to have indicators I was just going to ask if you had any ideas about other indicators you could use in a smaller time scale because I know that your man the amount of water for a hamburger or whatever I'm sorry if you guys know but are there not any proxy indicators that you guys have come up with to have ideas that could be used to assess what to use because you know I've dealt also with oil and things like that and you know we just end up having to do actual tests and stuff like that and they're rubbish as well and they don't really mean anything unless everybody else in the entire area switches off their pumps at the same time if possible you know so I don't know every day I'd be really interested to know if you have any ideas I'm sure that people have thought you can think about it while someone else also raised a few things yeah thank you for that go ahead yeah maybe can you say who you are oh yeah sorry my name is Nadine I am well not exactly in this field although I work with sort of like a heritage BCN's agency that we're doing projects on sustainability at the moment so I just find it interesting personally but I was wondering do you see the role of institutions such as yours do you see that playing a role in putting pressure on for example researchers, engineers to engage in these practices of you know going on these projects trying to learn about different methods of groundwater groundwater management do you see that as your type of role these types of organizations or which kind of player do you see starting that process of putting pressure on people to take part of that process good next question third one and then my face will get the floor again anyone you want to wish you to call the governance or you my name is Sigrid I used to study at SOAS and now I work as a water engineer and I missed the beginning which I'm sorry about because this is pretty interesting but I'm not mentioning the fact that groundwater is being viewed at a global scale which is damaging in a way because it becomes this sort of too abstract phenomenon in a way but what scale do you think is beneficial to view groundwater out because when you've got the sort of local and then the past regional but also national but water both my catchment areas and all slow act versus stuff doesn't necessarily follow those boundaries so like how to assess it or approach it in the most beneficial way does that make sense? you're asking for a solution the floor is yours there first I'd like your question about proxy indicator or who did it so on of my colleagues and I don't have how water figures in all kinds of certificates it's just the ability to understand what's going on and yes it's very difficult so what the proxy indicator that is used in every country is actually the presence of a group of agencies can be in the process here I can say a lot about that but it is very clear that that is not a good indicator for whether or not a water issue is spicy but yet that is as best as that so I don't know whether you've ever seen a water wise team something like that so I have arrived at some of those products that say hey by me because I'm producing water wise ways and this is done by me the presence of a group of agencies it's exactly the way I mean it's part of the work that you do to try to change those kinds of parameters about the measure of what is because it is a very holistic thing there's multiple aspects that go into it about what would make you use more water or less water and over a wise time period it's an interesting work when one of the biggest recommendations companies in the world it's a new team it's an Israeli company and I think some four or five years back they wanted the stock home water price the purpose of water price for company because of the good work they've been in saving water also a couple of years back they never know how to explain it because I'm not going to record in Spanish or stuff they used to be a kid who's kind of company so rather idealistic and then they went to the stock market and so I'm going to tell this to another one I find it very difficult so now you're kind of a you can find a few shares in the company and by these shares they they are worth something among the money in the market and it's all happens that I don't know what that kind of company is called it's called the MIA but it's all happens that my passion fund is investing in MIA and MIA is the fund that is hoping to make profit from the MIA shares so you see it's very complicated that's one way in which this is complicated the other way in which it's complicated with MIA going to the market what happened in Peru is that the people working for the company of MIA they suddenly were asked to double their sales and how can they double because they did not reach their sales targets they will be fired how can they reach higher targets is by over designing the drip system that they sell because then you sell more drip line if you over design of course you sell I'm just telling you yes yes we can yes I can say something to I can give some advice and write articles about it and I have an organised session at the Stockholm to talk about this inviting also people from Metafim etc how much will it change I'm not too optimistic about it because there's a lot of vested interest your question who are the agents of change yes I don't know so yes I had a small field for instance in my institute what I do is there are some very nice hydrogeologists and we collaborate we collaborate we have discussion they try to explain to me things about hydrogeology I try to explain to them how we look at the ground water governance which they find very complicated but at least there is some I think it's important to have this conversations I wish that if the same thing is open what I really believe in is one of the NGOs that we work with in Maharashtra and I forgot when you also know them it's up for them so we work with them they are hydrogeologists and we work with them excited not to work for the government or for private companies what they do is they engage with communities in attempts to help these communities know their ground water sources and then engage in all kinds of activities to protect or recharge these young scientists and they have some successes and failures but the intention is very good and I think oh yeah that doesn't happen at that level but of course that's also I don't know so you need many of them sorry if there's like a follow up question do you see that if there's for example success keys with one of these that maybe that would then lead to the whole chain of discussions about the policy changing and the greater things what is the thing that would really incentivise those types of changes as long as ground water is still seen as a source of profit and a source of development and if not if there's not a good thinking of what does development really mean or do we really need all that much profit then incentives to continue thinking or over-acting it's always more attractive a good pessimistic and just to add to for reference if you're interested we have recent paper water alternatives on ground water issues where the point is made that it's not just the capitalist farms but ground water extraction and visibility the materiality of that in a village also kind of defines the aspirations of poor people so it is also from even if you're not a ground water user it can represent very strongly economic and cultural aspiration and because it's one of the very few ways out of the diapobity or other people living and then to help with long term sustainability if you can get access to water then you will use it and then interesting that some of the initiatives that we've done in the ground water project around the oasis of the Moroccan community and what I find interesting there at least in some of them not in all of them there's also this concrete of the desert so around the oasis we want more land that's being cultivated also with ground water the oasis always used to have quite specific and strong institutions for sharing ground water and not just ground water but also sharing labour and sharing the income from produce and it seems that in some of them these institutions adapt to these new forms of agriculture and so the forms of chairmen here also would actively remain but those would be interesting to know more about and that's precisely what we're doing and guess what people say is true in Morocco young farmers they look to these slightly bigger farms and they find it so interesting that they think hey now it becomes possible for them to enter your farmer and to be cool and modern because that is the so they're really dreaming of they see themselves in the future operating their nuclear relations system from their mobile phone not having to get that people etc exactly now that technological dream is very good is your question being addressed? oh yeah your question what was your question again that's precisely the question that we tried to answer but I don't have a ready made answer I think there might be wisdoms in those in some of the initiatives that we have identified and I also think many of the initiatives have never made it to this quality leadership also because we defy all these all the existing conceptual schemes that there are about them a ground water government I should not say all but I have some logical exceptions I think to share what is important and what is called in India I have done some very interesting work and also documenting some interesting initiatives we have a few minutes left for a second round of short and sweet questions short and sweet so I've got two so you can pick which one so the first one is you mentioned that in Peru they were growing various and that they were using obviously a lot of ground water and in 2008 he said that in five years we've got why is it so hard to assess when we're going to ground ground water especially with the technology that's available today we can't assume that it's also difficult because a ground water is not either the ground or the other it's a very complicated so it is so it's a very complicated story because this is a valley and some 20 20 on the longer back we are going to make big investment in public infrastructure to transfer water from the more mountains to this valley to get interesting in our system but that water is also still there and so on the valley so that interacts with the ground water and then that is one aspect why this is difficult but then ask the hydroponcology it's simply difficult because you need to understand the geology so all the soil growth formations and then you need to know where is the water apparently this is very difficult this is difficult stuff yeah unless someone else raises these on her hand I only have a general question where can we get more information about your project because it seems like it's ongoing not a lot of information I agree tell us the acronym so that we can hear D2GS and we have a vacancy for a costa two vacancies one in Lancaster and one in Amsterdam I'll Francis it just yeah it's already been circulated in so while one more oh I forgot to say your name to you as well my question I don't know if it will be a question do you think this type of watercolon conversation is usually happening in all the stress country and usually which is developing so when they give more prioritising or when they prioritize more development it will lead toward a colonization because more things are coming at the next stage so what's the takeaway why all the stress countries are more colonized because the traditional notion of colonization is actually to grab the natural resources which are more in this type of colonization it is where there is more stress rather than the traditional notion and another query was like how would you define when you say redefine or theorizing down water governance do you have any situation like how would you think because if you are taking only the community management I think we can't deny the role of the state in the governance in total so do you have any suggestions on how we could redefine the ground water governance to bring the colonization why is this colonization in water stress countries usually the literature shows that on water stress countries American west is an example I know what the best course to do is the very attractive place to grow fruits and vegetables because in India the incident of Plachim and I happened in a water stress state a water stress place in Palachad when they can actually grab the water resources in more water rich water rich places but they prefer water less places and just my aim for this would be that in water stress place the primary source to be grabbed is land and where do you find land available where water is not physically available or not economically practically available so this is what the British did in Punjab of course it was not an empty area but it was a relatively empty area and that's where they constructed the canal colonies literally called canal colonies and that's how the imperial valley got colonised of course it was also not fully empty but it was relatively so I think it must be because water is enough water is such if you grab water in the north east of India they call this rainfall how do you get it to the places where you can actually use the land I think people will be looking for places where there is land available nice big stretches no pests in the beginning but the second question the government's question I think for me it's not so much not to look at the state or only look at the community I mean really about trying to find ways of understanding how government is actually done rather than so much emphasis on how government should be done and I think a lot of you on this issue on how it should be done guidelines principles and of especially water the gap between how water should be managed or how water should flow and how actually flows huge we know this because water is capricious so that makes even more important to study how how government is actually done that would be my first suggestion ok, thank you very much I'm sorry that we have stopped here it is already 8.30 even for so long this is a late time we are not yet at 24 hour intellectual economy but I'm sure at some point we will do that against our will so thank you very much David, give you a hand and congratulations thank you very much for coming and for asking such interesting questions and I feel it could say that is there another component in this series? yes but it's going to be on Friday the 6th